“Please ask Miss Halliday to come here.”

The boy hesitated.  “Miss Hallowell?” he suggested.

“Hallowell—­thanks—­Hallowell,” said Norman.

And it somehow pleased him that he had not remembered her name.  How significant it was of her insignificance that so accurate a memory as his should make the slip.  When she, impassive, colorless, nebulous, stood before him the feeling of pleasure was, queerly enough, mingled with a sense of humiliation.  What absurd vagaries his imagination had indulged in!  For it must have been sheer hallucination, his seeing those wonders in her.  How he would be laughed at if those pictures he had made of her could be seen by any other eyes!  “They must be right when they say a man in love is touched in the head.  Only, why the devil should I have happened to get these crazy notions about a person I’ve no interest in?” However, the main point—­and most satisfactory—­was that Josephine would be at a glance convinced—­convicted—­made ashamed of her absurd attack.  A mere grain of dust.

“Just a moment, please,” he said to Miss Hallowell.  “I want to give you a note of introduction.”

He wrote the note to Josephine Burroughs:  “Here she is.  I’ve told her you wish to talk with her about doing some work for you.”  When he finished he looked up.  She was standing at the window, gazing out upon the tremendous panorama of skyscrapers that makes New York the most astounding of the cities of men.  He was about to speak.  The words fell back unuttered.  For once more the hallucination—­or whatever it was—­laid hold of him.  That figure by the window—­that beautiful girl, with the great dreamy eyes and the soft and languorous nuances of golden haze over her hair, over the skin of perfectly rounded cheek and perfectly moulded chin curving with ideal grace into the whitest and firmest of throats——­

“Am I mad? or do I really see what I see?” he muttered.

He turned away to clear his eyes for a second view, for an attempt to settle it whether he saw or imagined.  When he looked again, she was observing him—­and once more she was the obscure, the cipherlike Miss Hallowell, ten-dollar-a-week typewriter and not worth it.  Evidently she noted his confusion and was vaguely alarmed by it.  He recovered himself as best he could and debated whether it was wise to send her to Josephine.  Surely those transformations were not altogether his own hallucinations; and Josephine might see, might humiliate him by suspecting more strongly—...  Ridiculous!  He held out the letter.

“The lady to whom this is addressed wishes to see you.  Will you go there, right away, please?  It may be that you’ll get the chance to make some extra money.  You’ve no objection, I suppose?”

She took the letter hesitatingly.

“You will find her agreeable, I think,” continued he.  “At any rate, the trip can do no harm.”

She hesitated a moment longer, as if weighing what he had said.  “No, it will do no harm,” she finally said.  Then, with a delightful color and a quick transformation into a vision of young shyness, “Thank you, Mr. Norman.  Thank you so much.”